Background My undergraduate degree was in Philosophy (University of Rome “La Sapienza”). I received my PhD in Philosophy in 2002 (London School of Economics). From October 2002 to September 2005, I was Research Fellow in history and philosophy of science at Girton College, University of Cambridge, affiliated with the Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science. Before joining UCL in October 2005, I lectured on philosophy of science and philosophy of physics at the University of Cambridge (Philosophy Faculty and Physics Department, Cavendish Laboratory).

STS Administrative Duties for 2009-10

• Graduate Tutor (term 2 and 3. On leave during term 1, Deputy Graduate Tutor: Dr Jon Agar)
• Year 2 Personal Tutor (term 2 and 3. On leave during term 1, Personal Tutor in absence: Simon Lock)

Undergraduate courses

HPSC 1009: History of Modern Physical Science
...................on-line reading list (link)
HPSC 2003: Topics in Philosophy of Science
HPSC 3020: Philosophy of Physics

 Current academic activities

• bibliography
• curriculum vitae

My main research areas are philosophy of science, and history and philosophy of modern physics:

1. I have a great interest in scientific realism and antirealism in philosophy of science (including Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism). In recent times, I have been working on the empiricist tradition of 'saving the phenomena' by looking at scientific practice and history of modern physics (see my BJPS 2007 article in the 'bibliography). Does science really aim at saving the phenomena? and how should we understand the very same notion of 'phenomena'? Latching onto Bogen and Woodward's (1988) distinction between data and phenomena, I have been defending a 'mildly Kantian' form of realism about phenomena (see my forthcoming article "From data to phenomena: a Kantian stance", Synthese, Special Issue edited by P. Machamer, J. Apel et al. containing containing the proceeding of a symposium in honour of Bogen and Woodward, Heidelberg, Sept. 2008).

2. Strictly related to the previous topic, I have been working in the past four years on Kant's conception of phenomena. This is part of my more general interest in Kant's philosophy of natural science and its legacy for current philosophy of science. To explore the far-reaching Kantian legacy for modern philosophy of science, I organised the Royal Instititute of Philosophy 2007 Annual Conference "Kant and Philosophy of Science Today" (2-3 July 2007, UCL; see the link to the website Kant conference for program details). For the proceedings, see M. Massimi (2008) Kant and Philosophy of Science Today, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press (click here for table of contents. For more info, visit CUP). As a follow-up, I am organising an international one-day workshop on "Philosophy of Natural Science from Newton to Kant" at UCL on 26 March 2010 with Robert DiSalle (Western Ontario), Andrew Janiak (Duke), and Eric Watkins (San Diego). I have explored Kant's view on phenomena and its implications both for the history of science and for current debates in philosophy of science in two recent articles, "Why there are no ready-made phenomena: what philosophers of science should learn from Kant" and "Galileo's mathematization of nature at the crossroad between the empiricist tradition and the Kantian one" (see under bibliography).

3. Laws of nature has been one of my main research interests since my PhD thesis. How can we characterise a fundamental law of nature? what is the role and function of a scientific principle? I have been addressing those philosophical questions by looking at the history of science, in particular the history of quantum theory.

My book for Cambridge University Press entitled Pauli’s Exclusion Principle: the Origin and Validation of a Scientific Principle reconstructs the history of the exclusion principle from the origins in spectroscopy to its later application in the quark theory. The historical analysis combines with the philosophical investigation of how a scientific principle originates, and the specific role of Pauli’s principle during the transition from the old quantum theory to quantum mechanics after 1925. The philosophical framework for this investigation builds up on Michael Friedman's "dynamic Kantianism".

As part of my past and still ongoing research interest on Pauli's exclusion principle, I am a member of the International Advisory Committee for the conference "Theoretical and experimental aspects of the spin-statistics connections and related symmetries", organised by the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), Trieste, Italy, October 21-25, 2008.

4. The other main area of interest is Thomas Kuhn (especially the late Kuhn, after the linguistic turn of 1980) and incommensurability between paradigms. I am interested in particular on how scientific revolutions can occur, how brand new concepts and laws can be introduced, and on whether Kuhn is right or wrong in claiming that after a scientific revolution scientists live in a 'new world'. I have in part addressed this issue already in my book on Pauli, but I am planning to explore it further within the broader context of constructivism and Kantianism.

Other research activities

I am engaged in integrating history and philosophy of science, and as such I am a member of the international committee for "Integrated History and Philosophy of Science" that organised the first &HPS1 international conference in October 2007 at the Center for Philosophy of Science (University of Pittsburgh). The second &HPS2 conference was held in March 2009 at the University of Notre Dame.

I am also a committee member of the British Society for Philosophy of Science, and a member of the program committee for the next EPSA (European Philosophy of Science Association) conference to be held in Amsterdam in 2009, as well as Associate Editor for the new European Journal for the Philosophy of Science.